Here’s a cool cover of Pearl Jam’s ‘Why Go’ by rapper POS. It’s been stuck in my head for the past few days, so I know it’s good. Pearl Jam has been in the news a lot lately, what with the rerelease of Ten and all.
Monthly Archives: March 2009
I Heart Webkit
Webkit is the rendering engine that runs Apple Safari and Google Chrome. Analogously, Trident powers IE and Gecko powers Firefox. Webkit, however, is by far the most advanced of the three (with Trident being a distant third).
Webkit supports some awesome advanced CSS features, including advanced selectors and animations. Check out some of these examples in Chrome or Safari 4 – the fact that all this is done without Javascript and Flash is simply amazing. Adding color transition events on mouse hover, for instance, is as simple as a single line in your CSS declaration:
-webkit-transition: color 1s ease-in-out;
Enhancements like this are progressive-style enhancements – they aren’t supported everywhere, but they likely will be in the web of the future (minus the ‘-webkit’ identifier), and they don’t take much away if they aren’t present.
Pi Day
Celebrated Pi Day yesterday with a pi pie. The pi symbol was made with watered down green food coloring. It didn’t turn out as well as I’d have liked – it would have been easy in frosting or something like that, but it didn’t really work out with the lemon meringue (which was totally delicious).
TorrentDroid – Nothing Illegal Here, Move Along
Check out this preview of the upcoming TorrentDroid, an Android program that lets you scan a UPC barcode for a movie, and through some magic, have that movie start to remotely download through your home computer. Part of that magic includes The Pirate Bay, but you kind of had to figure that if you want to factor ‘free’ into the equation.
Programs like this aren’t all that novel or difficult to write. It remains to be seen if a similar program would be allowed in something like the iPhone App Store. If I were a betting man, I’d say it or a similar program will be developed for the iPhone, but an official sanction is probably not on it’s way. That’s one great thing about Android – it’s openness leads to a much more versatile, fun device.
This One Is On Us
There’s now officially a product available from the extreme amount of material NIN recently released. The best part about this material? It’s high quality and totally free. Free, as in $0, not even a donation asked for free.
There are two albums under the combined name, Another Version of the Truth, Las Vegas and The Gift. All recordings are from live shows, with some of the audio coming from fan mics mixed with soundboard feeds. Both albums incorporate material from The Slip and Ghosts I-IV, which shows stong indicators that this internet-released music is something that’s going to be a permanent part of the NIN discography rather than an experiment in a new business model.
One strange and amazing thing is that there’s a DVD project on the site that aims to get together fans who are willing to produce and distribute burned DVD copies to fans who want such copies. That’s such a new, fresh idea that it’s very notable. Tape trading is something most bands tolerate, but to actively facilitate it is remarkable.
At this point, one has to ask whether Trent and Co. will ever release an album again with no free component to it. There certainly hasn’t been one for the past three releases. That’s extremely laudable, and it’s good business for NIN to boot. Check this out: